P. J. O’Rourke

Christmas begins about the first of December with an office party and ends when you finally realize what you spent, around April fifteenth of the next year.

The day I made that statement, about the inventing the internet, I was tired because I’d been up all night inventing the Camcorder.

Cointelpro really told you something about the government. Therefore, it was basically suppressed, it is still suppressed so that people don’t know anything about it. Watergate, on the other hand, was a minor scandal.

The laws ought to be so framed as to secure the safety of every citizen as much as possible. … Political liberty does not consist in the notion that a man may do whatever he pleases; liberty is the right to do whatsoever the laws allow. … The equality of the citizens consists in that they should all be subject to the same laws.

What happened to the confidence and ideals of the European dream? The EU was set up to protect freedom. It was the Soviet Union that stopped people leaving.

Saudi Arabia itself has one of the most grotesque human rights records in the world. The ISIS beheadings, which shock everyone-I think Saudi Arabia is the only country where you have regular beheadings. That’s the least of it.

I may find Saddam Hussein’s regime abhorrent – any normal person would – but the survival of it is in his hands.

We need to be very careful. Democracy is the issue, and democracy ought to be the means by which we decide these issues, rather than secret negotiations resulting in a fait accompli being presented to us.

I believe there’s too little patience and context to many of the investigations I read or see on television.

We have a planetary emergency. We have to find a way to create, in the generation of those alive today, a sense of generational mission.

There should be no unemployment. There is large percentage of labor now which cannot make a living because wages are not high enough. That is industry’s 2nd job. 1st job is to make good product. 2nd pay a good wage.

If we do not believe in freedom of expression for people we despise, we do not believe in it at all.

Distress is so severe that among white middle-aged Americans, mortality is actually increasing, something unheard of in functioning societies apart from war or pestilence. There are similar phenomena in Europe under the ‘business first’ (‘neoliberal’/’austerity’) assault.

I myself know some people who are gay. We’re on friendly terms. I’m not prejudiced in any way.

Have you read the things that were published in Moskovskiye Novosti and Ogonyok in those days? For instance, General Kalugin’s exposures? Kalugin is a traitor. I saw Kalugin during my time in Leningrad when he was deputy head of the Directorate. He was an absolute loafer. A loafer, perhaps, but he remembers you. He doesn’t remember anything. He does remember, and he says that from the point of view of the intelligence service, you worked in a province and had nothing to show for your performance. Oh, he doesn’t remember a thing. He couldn’t remember me. I had no contact with him, nor did I meet him. It is I who remembers him, because he was a big boss and everybody knew him. As to whether he knew me, there were hundreds of us.

It is difficult for me to imagine what personal liberty is enjoyed by an unemployed hungry person. True freedom can only be where there is no exploitation and oppression of one person by another; where there is not unemployment, and where a person is not living in fear of losing his job, his home and his bread. Only in such a society personal and any other freedom can exist for real and not on paper.